The Drone Company Quietly Taking Over Delivery

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Render - render.com/twist Deel - deel.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent - northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Today's show: The "Ryanair of drone delivery" just raised $50 million and plans to bring its technology from Europe to the United States. Manna founder Bobby Healy explains to TWiST how his Dublin-based company completed 300,000 deliveries while some rivals are still publishing blog posts, and why low-cost airline economics will decide who wins the autonomous skies. Sticking to the drone theme, TWiST welcomed Theseus co-founder Ian Laffey, who called in from Kyiv to tell us about his company's drone guidance system. It runs off a simple camera and Google Maps. The technology could rewrite the modern, GPS-jammed battlefield, and bring more firepower to smaller nations fending off larger foes. Guest Links: Manna https://www.manna.aero Bobby Healy https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhealy/ Manna funding announcement https://www.manna.aero/blog/series-b Theseus https://www.theseus.us/ Ian Laffey https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilaffey2/ Most recent Theseus funding announcement https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/17/defense-tech-theseus-landed-y-combinator-the-us-special-forces-and-4-3m-from-a-tweet/ The tweet that kickstarted Theseus: https://x.com/ilaffey2/status/1759353732075294766 Timestamps: 0:00 Bobby Healy of Manna joins TWiST 1:41 How a Manna base works: drones migrate around the city like Waymos 7:18 Battle-hardened in Irish weather: 97% uptime in wind and rain 8:52 Margin-positive economics & the path to $0.20 per delivery 9:25 Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 12:32 $50M Series B vs competitors raising $600–800M 19:51 Deel - Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit https://deel.com/twist to learn more. 22:53 The peer-to-peer drone future and hyper-local commerce 25:46 Growing from 170 to 570 people and moving manufacturing to Oklahoma 28:43 Ian Laffey of Theseus joins TWIST 29:57 Render: Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. 30:58 Inside Ukraine's drone industry: front-line iteration and free-market speed 33:55 How GPS gets jammed across the spectrum 35:10 Theseus's approach: cameras + satellite maps + ML 37:04 The product: Raspberry Pi, SD card, camera — pretending to be GPS 49:02 Ukraine: 6–8M drones a year. The US: 300K over two years. 51:17 Are US drone primes actually reconstituting the supply chain? 58:22 Y Combinator as a defense tech accelerator 59:40 "Pick an issue and start working as hard as you can towards it" Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex and when I was but a humble young boy, I read a book called the Bible and one thing that I talked about was Mana, coming down from heaven. Well, as it turns out, there's a company out there in the world of startups that is using that name because they are also bringing down goods from the sky called Mana. It's a drone delivery company based originally out of Ireland that is growing quickly, raising a lot of money and proving that the future really is not evenly distributed. I didn't know enough about this company, so I'm really glad to bring it to you. So please join me in welcoming to the show. It's Bobby Healy. Bobby, how you doing?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  This week in startups is brought to you by Render. Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform Render. Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500 to $100,000 in free credits depending on your stage and backers. Deal. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone, anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit deal.com/twist to learn more. And Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company

• 1:15Speaker 00

  and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. I had to kind of confess because I know I know ZipLine here in the States. I've paid a little bit of attention to the, you know, every three-year Amazon post about how they've solved drone-based deliveries. And to me, it's always felt slightly out of reach, but learning about your company, hot damn. You guys are doing enormous volumes across two different continents. So first of all, how did I become so far behind on Mana and its drone delivery success? I'm almost embarrassed.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Well, so because we started in Europe, so we're kind of the Ryanair of this industry, we think. And being based in Ireland, we're pretty below the radar. It takes years to get a business like this or a tech stack like this operationally clean and ready to launch. So we haven't even tried in the United States up until now. And now is the Time because of the regulatory environment. So the reason you haven't heard of us is because we haven't been looking to be found. And and now we are, we've raised a lot of capital. We're doing a lot of deliveries, like three hundred thousand and counting. And now we're all in on USA. So it's time for us to start talking to folks and kind of educating. Everyone around what's important in the industry, which is unit economics in our view.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  And so and here we are, and you're going to see and hear a lot more from us.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're going to dive into economics in a second, but I want to talk about how the business is is structured in terms of how it operates kind of on the ground and in the sky. One thing that Mana does talk a lot about is the speed of its deliveries. You guys talk about deliveries being as quick as three minutes, which is insane and awesome. But I'm curious about how that works. So how do you guys have? The drones kind of provisioned inside of a city or a community that you operate in currently? And is this a higher cap X requirement to have the ability to reach people so quickly? Because I would presume you would need more drone depots in more places than kind of one centralized hub.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we have in a city, take a city example. So you look at Dublin, for example, or Tulsa. Big city, very dense, about half a million suburban households. And we would have one central depot in the middle of the city and all the aircraft live there. And at night, they all migrate back there. They get their maintenance inspection. If they're due a maintenance inspection, they'll get maintenance work done. And then every morning, all our drones fly out to various different locations around the city. And they will sit on pads there waiting for business. They'll migrate dynamically across those pads. So think of it as a not terribly unlike a Waymo where, you know, the cars will be migrating around the city. In their case, to charge, in our case, to get maintenance.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  And you go where the action is. So the the really nice thing about food delivery is you get about twenty minutes notice. That the product needs to be moved because the prep time is about twenty minutes for hamburger and fries. So that is the time when if we don't have an aircraft at that location, we'll send one there ready to pick up the delivery. So there's that structural kind of insight that you have with drones that you don't have with other things is really useful.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  So sticking to the food. Case here. So I think that's what everyone kind of immediately thinks about when they consider drone deliveries. Talk to me about the linkage between customer orders, delivery platforms and how that plugs into to Mana. Because I could see this working economically several different ways. So I'm curious about how you get that information early and then also how that it kind of interfaces in a business sense with those providers.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we we've we contracted with all of the big players, so DoorDash, Uber Eats in Europe, Just Eat Deliveroo and so on. And so they bring the orders to us. We we get them via API. It goes to the restaurant. They get told to prepare the product. We get told and we acknowledge that we can fly that product at that time from that location. So all that happens, the consumer. Interestingly, in Europe now, Just Eat, for example, default to drone delivery. They don't default to road-based delivery. So you actually have to work harder to choose road-based delivery. That's a big statement, I think, to how good and how much better drone delivery is.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  And that would be in markets where Mana is.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Where we are.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  So they hit our API. If we reply, yes, we can do that, then the consumer will be given drone deliveries number one option. Yeah.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  You know, I have spent a reasonable lot of time in Europe, but I am most certainly an American. And when I think about the suburban American world, I'm thinking about lawns that are relatively large, kind of flat spaces where you could land things. My experiences in Europe, they tend to be slightly more dense. Living environments. So how does that translate for for drone deliveries? Because I can see working here with our big old backyards, but I'm not sure it's the same setup.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  It's much harder here. So we we yet to find a house we can't deliver to. So that's a good thing. And Dublin and Helsinki are extremely dense. Helsinki is 90% apartments. Dublin is really dense. But we can deliver onto a trampoline and we frequently do. Fun fact, 15% of suburban gardens have a trampoline in them. So we only need about two meters wide, flat, inanimate area on which we can deliver. And so so in suburban context, we don't have a problem. The real trick is actually delivering on high winds. So we. Deliver from pretty high up and we put the bag down, you know, G the GPS positioning is one thing, right?

• 6:36Speaker 01

  You know where you are accurately, but getting the bag where you know the bag needs to be is about flight dynamics and and stuff like that. So you couldn't build a business like this in a more difficult place than Ireland because we're

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Famously a windy place.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Windy, windy, rainy, everything. We get four seasons a day. Um, so we're, we're, we're, and we've nailed like we're ninety seven percent available in Irish weather, which means we're eight hundred percent available in any other country, normal country.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  So we're, we're well battle hardened, I would say.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Uh, and the proof is kind of in the numbers. Now you mentioned three hundred thousand deliveries. Uh, when I was reading through your series B announcement, fifty million dollars announced at the start of April of this year.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  You guys have said two hundred and fifty thousand, uh, deliveries. So what's the current pace? Is it, uh, over a hundred thousand a month now? I'm trying to just figure out how quickly you're growing.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  As we add bases now, as we add one base for us, right, is about roughly about a hundred thousand deliveries annually. And we've added another ten bases now already here in Ireland. They won't be as productive as US bases. And we have about forty bases contracted in the United States. So we were aiming rough target about two million annualized deliveries by the end of twenty six. We don't know what our target is for the end of twenty seven, depends on how end of twenty six goes. And but but the whole industry is there is kind of ourselves, Zipline, Google, Amazon. We're all throttling up at the same time because of that regulatory kind of change that's happened.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  And so for us, we can do that with our eyes closed. We could do ten million deliveries with our eyes closed. It's a matter for us now of just, you know, eating the elephant one bite at a time. And I think the whole industry is moving to a point now where capital is going to drive pace. It's no longer regulatory uncertainty or tech or any of those things, product market fit, all those things. And for us at least, the difference is, I mean, I think it's fair to say all of the the great companies that are doing this are ready to Scale and already scaling. The difference with us is we're we're margin positive already. We already make money on nearly every delivery we do. The only deliveries we don't make money on are the lost leaders, like a pint of milk, a liter of milk, whatever.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  And those are the ones that get people in the door, but but we're actually quite a strong margin already on on a per flight basis and our locations that we open up are profitable already.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  So when I order Uber Eats here in my current hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, I often pay slightly higher food prices. I pay a black box of service fees and other things. I pay a delivery fee and then I pay a tip. How does my economics change from the consumer perspective when I'm using one of your drones versus paying Bob to drive around in his camera?

• 9:25Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:05Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:18Speaker 01

  So I think the way consumers and restaurants for that matter should look at this is we're going to drive the marginal cost of drone delivery down to about 20 cents per delivery. And by the end of by the end of this year, our marginal cost, sorry, our marginal cost is already a fraction of what it costs a road based delivery. And by the end of this year, we'll we'll likely be in the kind of one to $2 marginal cost territory. And so the way the consumer should think about this is, well, look, if if everything's gone robotic and automated. Now in digital, why would I need to consider the cost of, you know, the $15 cost plus tip that it takes a guy in a car or a motorbike, whatever it is. So

• 11:00Speaker 01

  the question is, where does that value go? Who who pockets that difference? I think the consumer will definitely pocket some of it. I think the restaurant could pocket some of it. And I think the aggregator is going to do great, too. And the other thing is, don't only think about cost. The cost is is a given in this case. Think about our NPS, like our NPS. The last five years we've been flying and is high eighties, early nineties net promoter score. That's a higher NPS than Apple have or any of the best companies in the world have. And it's not because we're geniuses. It's because the mode of a flying robot carrying your product and getting hot French fries, a hot coffee, not melted ice cream,

• 11:39Speaker 01

  delivered to your back garden in three minutes, that it just gets people so excited about about buying stuff that you're you're naturally going to be much happier and that floats all boats, right? That means that consumers will order more, aggregators will be happy, businesses will be happy, everyone wins.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  I mean, if I could order food from around my town and pay closer to restaurant prices and get it faster and hotter, I'm paying less for a better service, which means my usage will go through the roof.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  I mean, and I'm already, I I've got young kids. So like, there's been many a night when I'm like ordering something at night because I forgot to eat dinner. You know, so this is super pertinent to to to my needs. The capital point you made is very interesting to me. It sounds like if you solve the demand side and the getting things downside from drones and even up to drones, then all you do need then is capital to build out operations, buy more drones and land more partnerships. So $50 million in Series B, it's a lot of money. But I do know that some of your competitors in the US are raising nine-figure rounds in the 600, 800 million dollar range. So do you guys have enough capital to compete if capital has become kind of the the bottleneck to growth as you've described it?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not. Capital has never been a bottleneck for us. You know, we have never been ready to scale the business yet. Our costs are fractal. Of anyone else's. So as we scale, we'll actually generate cash. So our our locations, the location we roll out, we say 10 aircraft is contribution positive day one because we get a demand from aggregators. And then it's so it's producing cash, it pays itself off in somewhere between seven and 12 months, depending on utilization. So we will use debt for a lot of our growth and we'll of course use equity as well. So we're much ready, we're we're fit and ready. So we're not going to need as much capital as anybody else, and that should allow us to scale much more quickly.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  And but as I said, I don't think any of the players in this industry are going to be constrained for capital. Because we started where we started, our costs are a tenth of what it costs to do the same thing in the United States. That's just labor cost. So that all that advantage goes away when we scale operation in the USA. But as I said, you know, having contribution positive economics, even on low utilization, means that, you know, we can be very, very efficient with capital.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  I feel like we buried the lead a little bit here, which is the drones that you're using to actually pull off these deliveries. Because it seems that if you're going to have such strong contribution margins from, you know, recently deployed drones, they must be super durable. They must be super good at all the things. So talk to me about the drones that you're using. And also what what they bring to the business apart from just kind of the core mechanics of delivery.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Excellent question, because that really that really gets to the to the real function here. One of our drones does 75,000 deliveries in its lifetime. So that's the first thing. The maintenance cycle is we're less than a half a percent maintenance downtime per aircraft. And that half a percent is what actually adds the cost because you've got to scale a maintenance organization. So we've been using the same design aircraft for over five years. So it's it's tested, it's just simple as hell. And it's a really low cost of ownership. So 75,000 flights over the life means that it's just, I mean, the capital cost is inconsequential to to the actual revenue generated. But even more important is the maintenance cost, the actual cost of ownership into every flight that we fly is tiny.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  So we think like a low cost airline. We do not think like Tesla or SpaceX or any of those guys. We think like Ryanair or Southwest when they were good. That's that's really what's going to be the winner in this business. It's going to be low cost airline mentality.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  I agree with everything you just said, especially the point that Southwest used to be good and is now not. I never wanted Diet Coke United, thank you very much. I wanted Southwest, which I used to have.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Complexity as well, connecting flights, all this stuff that they layered on, all makes sense if you're looking to grow, but relentless focus on cost and operation efficiency is what will win in this space. It ain't cool or sexy or any of that stuff. It's going to be absolutely obsession with unit cost and efficiency, assuming that you have safety right.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  When I think about Ryanair, another kind of like ultra low cost providers, what I think about them is like, and I don't even mean this in a rude way, Bobby, but kind of the commoditization of air travel. And so when you're talking about, you know, the importance of efficiency and so forth, to me, it sounds like you're, you kind of imagine that in time, there's going to be quite a lot of companies that can offer drone based deliveries. So you're going to win, not by being the flashiest, your, you know, Tesla example, but instead just being downright the most efficient. So really the Ryanair example is, it's not really, wow, it's a pretty solid.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  It's a commodity product, Alex. It's a commodity product. Like it's not, like I said, it's not, people aren't buying drone delivery. They're buying a hamburger or a burrito. They, our customers do not care that they're getting to buy drone delivery anymore. They're just buying a burrito. So therefore your marginal cost of getting that product that a customer needs to be lower than the road based equivalent, or you're not winning. And then once we're all there, then it's going to be not a race to the bottom, but you know, Warren Buffett said, you know, in a commodity market, he with the, with the best cost base will win, right? So, you know, there's lots of truck drivers in the world with lots of small logistics companies, but Amazon are crushing it because of scale and the efficiency of their network. Those, those reinforcing the

• 17:08Speaker 01

  kind of network effect of a large logistics network. So therefore, if you concentrate and provide a dense network of delivery drones, and you already have lower costs, you're, nobody is going to touch you on competition.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  I want to get to your US suspension next, but I'm curious about the getting set up in a new area question. I've talked to a lot of self-driving companies, Wabi and Blamo and everybody. And there's different approaches to mapping and kind of understand the world that you're operating in when you have a self-driving vehicle. Now, clearly, of course, drones are up in the sky, very different. But you probably still need to know, like, for my house, if I order, where's my backyard? Where are the trees? So what is, what is the time and investment look like to prepare to go to, let's say, Tulsa?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, big fat zero. Um, nothing, nothing. So we, here's what happens. We sign a location, a bit of real estate at the roof of a restaurant or their car park. We put aircraft on the ground. We plug in our unit, the charging system, and it's, it's done. There's like, you can literally straight away start ordering through DoorDash or Uber Eats when that happens, or through our own ordering app. And if you as a consumer order with us, the first time we've seen you, we'll ask you to verify your address. We'll show you a picture of your house and you'll say, yes, that's where it is. And that's it. Done. And we'll automatically select the location to deliver on to in batch, and then we'll fly there to deliver the product. Then the aircraft takes over and decides itself if that's a safe area to deliver or

• 18:38Speaker 01

  not. So it'll detect children underneath or obstacles, anything like that. And if there's anything in the way, the aircraft will just bring the product home, it won't deliver. And if there's nothing in the way, it'll deliver. It's all fully automated.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  What would it cost, and hear me out, for me to bribe you to bring this to where I live sooner than you're currently planning? Because-

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Rhode Island's full of Irish people, so we can be there very quickly. So like, we're focused right now, rest of this year, on Oklahoma and Texas. That's all we're gonna do. But 27, we have really ambitious plans for 27. And as I said, a lot of it will be determined on what we can achieve in 26, but we're supremely confident that we're gonna absolutely knock it out of the park. And we see ourselves as being the leader in the United States, not too much time from now, won't be this year, but we can definitely be there next year.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  I believe it. So let's talk about the US. You mentioned that the regulations have either changed or become clear in a way that's opened up the door for you guys to expand here in the States. Talk to me about that progression and I'm curious about the regulatory differential between, let's say broader Europe and the States.

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• 20:54Speaker 01

  So there was an executive order about 12 months ago now from the administration. It says, "America wants to gain drone dominance right." And that's in response to geopolitics. That was the trigger because if you'd asked me more than a year ago, I would've said USA is nearly in last place and Europe is, China's leading, then it's Europe and then it's USA. And that's now upside down. Now the USA is the world leader in readiness to scale this technology, thanks to a new administrator in the FAA and an executive order. So what we've seen and has witnessed by the growth of everyone in the USA is USA is open for business in this technology. And finally, we've reached the point where, and we just got four new locations approved

• 21:39Speaker 01

  in the USA, it took 30 days. That would've taken years before. And we've seen in our friends. You know, our frenemies that are over there, same thing. It's just absolutely nothing in the way of scaling this industry. And and and so behind that, there's the old part one three five regs, the part one oh seven regs and the upcoming part one oh eight regs. And and all of these are progressions towards an endpoint of unlimited scale. But one three five and one oh seven have not been really fit for purpose because of the overheads associated with them.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  And now with one oh eight, we see the perfect set of regulations to scale the industry.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  So to me, just talking to you, I'm actually more excited than I've ever been about this industry and its growth. Because it feels like you've really solved all the problems and you know you're going to finance it and it's positive, you can unit economics and your drone technology is sorted out. How long until I can call one of your drones to my house, not just for a delivery, but to put in. I I don't know, like some soup that I made and send it to a friend of mine because to me.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Why not? Like, I I why can't I use this also in my career?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  In my original business plan, eight years ago for this business, when I have the, you know, when I wrote the notes. If if the next use or the next wave of this, after we democratized access for restaurants and aggregators to get delivery. It was then peer to peer delivery, right? So you could be baking delicious cakes or cookies in your house and you can make a living out of it. And you can suddenly reach four hundred thousand customers with an automated delivery system that costs peanuts. And so that is in my list of things to do. It's just, you know, like I said, how do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time. There's ninety two million suburban homes in the United States that we want to, we want to get to and build. A meaningful commercial relationship with over the next five years.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  So I think you will get that peer to peer delivery you're asking for, but it'll come sometime after the first wave of growth that we all go through.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was thinking about it as peer to peer, like, you know, let's say that some other parent needs a pacifier or a particular medicine or whatever. I could just send it to them without having to like deal with car seats.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Imagine the marketplace you could build. Imagine the marketplace you could build on top of this where. You've got a million people living in the city that can literally connect with each other with a five. In a flight, they can deliver anything to each other. Now, there's obviously other considerations to think about with that. But if you think with with an innocent lens, that's going to really power the local economy like a way that's never been seen before. And so whereas now we all live on gigantic Amazon fulfillment centers and they make their logistics scale, serve that really well. With drones and robotics, you have this new ability to really do localized, hyper-localized stuff that's even cheaper than these giant networks.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  So the, you know, it's, it's, it's difficult to imagine what other things you could do with it. There's so many options here.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  But I, I think the ability for people to build a business on top of the infra you're building is, is incredibly interesting and underexplored when you think about drone deliveries. Cause I think you're right. People do think about them as burgers and fries now.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  I'd say we, we have that already. We've got, for example, one ice pop. I don't know if you've got ice lollies, you would call them, a small little business.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Popsicles we call them here, yeah.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Popsicles, right. So we've got a small little indie popsicle maker, a family business. They got their factory out in their back garden. And they're selling in the summer, they're selling thousands of ice pops a day through our system, delivering straight to households. So that's already happening, what you're talking about. We're just doing it in a selective way. It's not really pure to pure. It's a small business to everybody else, but it's already happening.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  You are going to have to have some really interesting regulations on keeping people in the future of P2P product from not sending cocaine through the drones.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. That was kind of what I was chuckling. Yeah, yeah. Hundred percent. You know, that's the thing with robots. Robots don't ask questions, right? And so, so that'll be a factor, but it's, it's not something right now we're preoccupied with.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  All right. Last question for me is the job growth thing. So when I was just going back through your series, the announcement from a couple of weeks ago, you guys talked about growing from a hundred and seventy people to over five hundred and seventy. And, you know, it's interesting because when I think about technology companies today, everyone's talking about, you know, static team size, letting people go. So really kind of encouraging to see that you're very into hiring humans, but is that because of the unique elements of your business needing to have these? Own depots and maintenance and so forth, or are you just a bit more human positive than some other technology leaders that I talked to?

• 26:10Speaker 01

  We love humans. I love humans. So the truth is, we're pivoting from or migrating from being a pure technology company. Where we have about 200 folks in Dublin to being an operational airline essentially. And with that comes all this overhead of maintenance, just all the operations. Like you have to clean bird crap off your motors. There's stuff that, you know, humans, you know, just you need humans for. So most of our people we'll hire will be the ops people that just operate everything. And then the other big thing is we're moving manufacturing to the United States.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's a big deal, right? So we're in as much as we can. We want to have a US only supply chain for our aircraft that are in the USA. So that will mean a lot of heads. Probably of the 400 people that we've we've budgeted for this for this particular phase of business, probably about 300 of them will be in Oklahoma.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Well, shout out to the Oklahoma economy.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  The Okies. Oh, the Okies.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Flat, central, probably not too hard. I mean, it's kind of the phoenix of

• 27:19Speaker 01

  You're struggling for good things to say. It's a great place. I love it. I mean, it's so, so much diversity all over the USA. It's a wild, crazy place, I will admit.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  But so is Texas. So is the USA. That's what's great about it. And I'm moving there. So it's going to be even better.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, we'll take any, you know, America's a big place. We got a lot of space. Come on down. But Bobby, I think that people should now understand what you're doing. And I think they're going to hear a lot more from you guys in the next, I guess, you know, nine to 21 months, kind of through the end of this year, through the end of next year. So if people want to learn more, what's the website? And do you want to shout out a job you're looking to fill here in the US that the right person might be listening to?

• 28:01Speaker 01

  So the website is mana.aero, A E R O, and it's a fun website. And then the job is everything but mechanical engineering, key, electrical engineering, software, obviously, in the USA particularly, head of manufacturing. So that's the hard one to fill. So somebody to lead our manufacturing efforts over there. Everything else is all engineering stuff.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  All right. And I do really want to thank you for your commitment to when you open your first Northeast hub, it'll be in Providence, Rhode Island. You heard it here first, folks.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  It's a contract. It's the deal. Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  No, Bobby, an absolute treat. And I hope everything goes as well as you think because I'm very lazy and like to stay home. So thank you very much for making my

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  Today, we're going to war. No, we're not going to get into a tank. We're not going to get into a ship. I'm not going to fly off an aircraft carrier. Instead, we're going to talk about the use of drones in war and where they do well and where they don't do well. One issue we've seen across the Ukrainian battlefield after the Russian invasion is that there's a lot of GPS jamming going on. That means if you depended on using GPS to fly your drones to where they're supposed to go, you might have a bad time. Drones sometimes even go off course, landing in the wrong country, which is a big problem in international relations. But one thing that we can do is improve the ability of drones to fly without GPS. And that brings us to today's guest, which is a company called Theseus. They are building a system that allows drones to fly without needing satellites to tell them where they are at. Apparently, it uses Google Maps and a camera.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  Sounds very simple. To tell us more about it, Ian Laffey is here. Ian, how you doing?

• 29:30Speaker 03

  I'm doing great, Alex. Thanks for having me.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Oh, dude, an absolute pleasure. And normally, it doesn't matter where our guests are calling in from because startups are a global game and people travel. But tell me where you're at and why, if you can.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm here in Kyiv. I've been here for a couple of weeks and will be here for several more, just flying our system with a bunch of different people, partnering with drone companies and doing fun stuff.

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• 31:00Speaker 00

  We're going to talk about what you have built and why, but can you just give me the snapshot of the drone industry in Ukraine? Clearly at the forefront of drone technology, now helping countries around the Middle East defend themselves. But what's it like to be in the in the mix?

• 31:15Speaker 03

  I think the most interesting thing about the drone industry here is how competitive it is, how much of a free market it is. So I think when you look at defense in general in the US and the way that we procure things, like we are at war now, but the wars that we are at and the wars that we go into are much different from the war here. And here you have like a front line, you have a place where thousands and thousands and thousands of people are fighting every day and the technology needs to work there and it's very easy to get it out there. And so I think that that really lends itself to, you know, you hear a lot about scrappy startups, but also just like much faster iteration cycles,

• 31:58Speaker 03

  because you can take something and actually know if it works on the order of like days instead of, you know, many, many, many months to years.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  You're not doing as much testing in the lab versus deploying on the field. So you have a pretty quick information feedback loop on how the technology works and what's doing well and what's not doing well. I guess that's a real. Benefit to the improvement of drone technology, terrible circumstances, but at least we're making some progress. How fast is the drone versus drone technology race advancing? Cause I know that also, you know, of course Russia uses a lot of drones and Ukraine uses a lot of drones. So is it something where you can kind of see one side pull ahead and the other side catch up and back and forth like that?

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the big advantage that Ukraine has is Starlink. So they they have access to Starlink and Russia doesn't have access to Starlink.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  You're seeing more AI drones coming out of Ukraine than you're seeing out of Russia. I think Russia clearly has an advantage in the, call it like Lucas type, you know, Shehade type drones. They produce like hundreds of them every day.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  And yeah, I mean, it's it's definitely, it's definitely constantly changing. It it seems like a situation where there's, there are no winners, right? There's only losers.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  It it it doesn't seem like anybody is kind of breaking away as as far as as that goes.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  So Starlink is a great segue into kind of what your company does. Now, when I think about connectivity, I'm familiar with how GPS works. And I know that there's other GPS equivalents from other nations and blocks around the world. And we also now have for the first time, really in human history, functional satellite internet across a large amount of the planet. So tell me about the connectivity issues that drones are having in Ukraine. And then walk me from there into how your technology plugs the resulting gaps.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  The interesting thing when you look at Starlink, right, is it's A, it's very modern. It's got this, these panels and they're, they're very directional and that's not how GPS works at all. You have these geostationary satellites that have been around for decades and they're very, very low power. And and and they're also in like known frequencies. And so what that means is it's very, very easy. Easy to basically shout over them with a different radio and and then you end up jamming them. Uh, and and so what you see here is jamming across the whole spectrum, you know, there's a radio spectrum. Um, and you can cover different parts of it with different amounts of power. Uh, and GPS is kind of just a band where if you let it go without being jammed.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Uh, it's just so devastating in terms of precision guided munitions and and your ability to collect. Information and ISR um that it's basically an absolute necessity to jam GPS. And so you you see that just universally jammed in addition to communication links uh being jammed. Uh, different links in different places at different times. Um, and and so what we do is we kind of circumvent the whole problem of radio. Uh, like you said, um, at the beginning, or maybe in in the preamble before we started like. It's it's a camera and there's satellite maps on board and it tells the drone where it is. Uh, and we've spent a a lot of time training an algorithm that's able to look at very old, very out of date, very bad satellite maps.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Uh, and very bad camera imagery and still figure out where it is, uh, given all of those circumstances.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  So the way that I understand this Ian is that if you have a topographical map and a camera. You can essentially look out through the camera, see what you see, compare it to the map and then. Get a reasonable understanding of where you are. Uh, but to me, that does not sound incredibly precise. Now with GPS, when I'm in New York City, it can tell which corner at the intersection that I'm at. So it's it's incredibly precise and and quick. So how much uh fidelity do we lose by going to your system? And to be clear, I understand that it's the only one that works. So like, I'm not trying to be unkind, but I'm just curious about how well we can do. Compared to the GPS that people listening to this probably already know and understand.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  It's a great question. Uh, GPS is is amazing.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  And I I think what's really interesting about uh about this is you've had these kinds of solutions for. You know, decades on, if you look at something like a a tomahawk missile, right? Like that has uh that has a laser range finder and a really good topo map and it can figure out where it is. Um, really, what we see ourselves as doing is like taking that from like. Yeah, government level maps and a really nice rangefinder onto, you know, like a $25 camera off Amazon and very low resolution maps. And so to answer your question, yeah, the answer is not very precise. So we advertise 30 meter median accuracy.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  And that is enough to get you from A to B, but it's not enough to tell you where you are on a, on a street corner.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  But that's kind of also something that's like, uh, pretty important to us. Once you start getting into higher levels of precision. You know, there's, there's a lot more considerations around that kind of technology.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  So 30 meters sounds like a lot, but actually I don't think it is because, and I, I don't mean to be kind of crass about this, but some drones go boom. And I wouldn't want to be 30 meters away from one of them doing so. So I presume there is a, a margin for error in.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Targeting, yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  The, the, the going boom is not, you know, it's, it's not really like a, the, the core focus for us. Um, what, what we're focused on is, is getting a drone from A to B over very long ranges. And over very complicated environments. So if you need to fly a drone for 600 kilometers, you know, in a straight line over fields and still know where you are, uh, we can help you with that. But it, you know, it, it, that kind of, um, like last mile targeting and like, uh, strike capability has just not been a, a focus for us.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  So I think then that we should better understand what that use case is you're describing. When do I need to send a drone in a straight line for six hours? And to be clear, I'm, I'm exposing my lack of operational knowledge of drone warfare here, but that's not a circumstance that I kind of expected unless you're going. Deep into an enemy country, for example.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  You know, back to the topic of of radios, right, is is like to to maintain communication with a drone is difficult in a jammed environment. And so if you want to go and you want to take pictures of things and and fly around and stream video back or go and record data over someplace without getting jammed and be able to go complete that mission and then come home. Or, you know, go fly that mission and then stream data back over Starlink the whole time. These are things that we we help with. And I would just say that is generally like this stuff that we like to to talk about and and focus on is is kind of those capabilities.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  My understanding is that Starlink is actually pretty difficult to jam. Is that correct, Ian?

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just like a physics problem. They have a highly directional antenna. And it's it it makes it much more difficult to to jam that that kind of phase array.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  So in time, do you think that we get smaller and smaller satellite internet receivers, Allah Starlink or whatever from, you know, Blue Origin or from the E or whatever? And does that does that dramatically change the state of drone warfare? Or do you think that we're still going to need GPS replacements? Without kind of real time satellite connectivity to ensure that we can keep doing the drone operations that we need to get done?

• 40:20Speaker 03

  I think you said kind of two things there. And the first, definitely, like you're you're just going to see, you know, you're going to see Starlink direct to cell. You're going to see like a tiny little chip that connects your phone, your phone or your drone to a satellite from anywhere in the world where SpaceX lets you do that. The the thing that I would say there is is that, you know, communications and positioning are kind of two different things. So like you think about your iPhone. You have an LTE network that lets you call people and, you know, look at Twitter. And then you have the GPS, which lets you, you know, you combine that with the LTE to then use Google Maps or to find where you are in the woods.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  And so, you know, it's kind of two separate things. The other thing I'd say that's super interesting with Starlink, and I think this was something that we always viewed as like a risk for our business, but it's been interesting to see them move in the opposite direction is Starlink actually, because it's satellites flying around, they know where the satellites are, like you can position off of Starlink. And so, a lot of people in Ukraine, as well as in the US, had begun to use Starlink panels and use a positioning feature that's already in them to fly their drones. And there, you know, there's some pros and cons to that over vision. But I think this goes live in about seven days, it may be like nine days, but Starlink has basically just like completely blocked that

• 41:45Speaker 03

  capability or made it like so inaccurate that, you know, it's maybe like 50 kilometers precise unless you pay them a bunch of money for like military Starlink contract. And so, you know, that's just not really the domain that we operate in. For me, like the point of a drone is that it's cheap. And we in the US and other places have like really great technology. Like I think you're always going to need a great aircraft. But there's a certain value that you get to making something just like dirt, dirt, dirt, cheap and making millions of them.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, that's why using a camera and maps is incredibly cheap. As you said, you can buy some of that stuff off of Amazon. So tell me about the company's product itself and the fact that it can work on, I think you guys say pretty much any drone. I would love to better understand how it attaches. And also, what does it cost to get one of these onto a drone today?

• 42:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we, right now, what we have is, so we started off, I guess I'll back up, is that we started off with this box. And you put this box onto the bottom of a drone and it plugs in and it pretends to be GPS. And there's actually like a bunch of people that do similar stuff. There weren't really when we, when we started, but there's a bunch. And what we found with that is that it kind of sucks for a bunch of technical reasons I won't get into. And so what we realized is that you can actually just pull the software out of that and design it in such a way that A, you can run it on basically any computer. So you don't need a GPU. You don't need

• 43:26Speaker 03

  anything fancy. You can run it on like a $65 Raspberry Pi. And then also building in just a variety of cameras. So thermal cameras, electro-optical or just like regular cameras and supporting all of those things out of the box. And so for us, that's kind of been the evolution of a product is like, we still sell that as physical hardware, but then also offering that to customers who they themselves have really developed supply chains. They already have the compute on board. They have the ability to go and buy these systems. And it's like, you know, very open book. I mean, I'll even say it here on the, on the podcast, right? It's like, it's a camera and a Raspberry Pi and an SD card.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  There's no, there's no secret sauce.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  Don't give away the secret sauce. I mean, I think I could probably actually put those together over a weekend with enough Claude credits, you know?

• 44:20Speaker 03

  I think you could definitely put it together. Yeah. It's, the hardware is, it basically needs to be a commodity. And honestly, like, the, the whole thing needs to commodify because these things just need to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And this has been kind of something that I, I've been thinking about a lot is like, you know, position, a position as a product, it's like, you don't need to build a differentiated positioning product. You need to build a really good positioning product and deliver it at a lower cost basis and a higher scale.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  This reminds me a little bit of like the automotive industry. Because one thing that someone told me who works in robotics is that, you know, if you make a component for automotive, they're going to grind you down on cost. And they're also going to demand that it works for like 200,000 miles being bounced around in a hot temperature. So they just want simple, high-performance, cheap. And it sounds like that kind of maps to what we need for our drones. But Ian, it sounds like then the company Theseus has become much more a software company than a combined hardware and software company.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  At the end of the day, I see us as a reliability company. Like, our job is to solve, uh, solve the problem of autonomy. So since, since we've started, um, our goal has been to keep good guys from getting killed. And what that looks like to me is, is having less people on the battlefield where they can get killed. And the way that you do that is you make systems more autonomous, or you make the systems that are piloted by people able to be piloted from farther away from the dangerous places. And so in order to do that, you need to make those systems reliable. Because really, the job of an operator in a combat zone is reliability.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Humans are very good at solving, uh, you know, problems that crop up on the fly. We have very high common sense. And so we kind of fill in the gaps in reliability in systems. And so how I see our company is, is that we take these systems that are pretty unreliable and, uh, you know, you could say like janky or hacky, and we make them more reliable. And so what that looks like today is, um, you know, the most, most foundational aspect of autonomy. Like, you can look at a drone that was made in like 2003. And before jamming, that had a higher level of autonomy, uh, to any drone that you're going to see in, in Ukraine flying up until maybe the last year or so.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  And, and so by just delivering the position to the drone, you're increasing the reliability of it and you're increasing that autonomy level back up to something that's, that's on par. Um, and then we see that as, as just like extending out farther and farther from there.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  So essentially, we got really far with drone technology when GPS worked, just generally speaking. And now that we are in a post GPS era for warfare drones, we've had to essentially rebuild to get back to the level of autonomy that we had. Okay, well, that's difficult, but I'm glad we've gotten there. What can you tell me about progress in the Thesius technology? Because you guys have been at this now for a couple of years. You're in Ukraine, you're doing, I presume, testing of some sort. But how quickly does the technology improve? And is it improving along a accuracy axis or more of a cost and reliability axis?

• 47:45Speaker 03

  With accuracy, there's like, you know, just regulatory considerations. So that's not really like a priority for us. We actually don't want to make our system more accurate right now. That being said, yeah, just reliability and cost. I think you hit the nail on the head there. And it's really just a matter of like, I think even myself, like I'll just speak for myself here. Like it's, it's very, very, very, very, very, very different to like field a piece of technology in a war zone versus not in a war zone. And, and so I think for us, you know, the first half of our, of our company's life

• 48:30Speaker 03

  has just been getting our product to even work well enough that it, it makes sense for somebody to use it. And then the past year has been, oh, okay, we know that this works. We know that it works well. How do we go, how do we get this, you know, to scale 1 million? And what are all the roadblocks that we need to knock down in order to, to do that?

• 48:52Speaker 00

  How many drones a year does Ukraine need? And what do you think should be the capacity of the United States to manufacture drones? Because

• 49:01Speaker 00

  I know there's been a lot of talk about reindustrialization of the United States, building our manufacturing capacity back up, but it's hard for me to tell where I sit, if that's a lot of people cosplaying in Bob the Builder hats, or if they're actually making, you know, real progress towards shovels in the ground.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  I love all drone companies. They are our customers. So they're, you know, good things to say only. So Ukraine right now is at like, I don't know, six to eight million drones a year. The US, we have this historic drone dominance program. That is, I think it's 300,000 drones over the next two years. I've talked to, you know, the guy who runs that program. And what they've said, which I think is really good, is that the focus of that program is,

• 49:51Speaker 03

  yeah, it's to get the one-way attack drones. That's very important. But it's also kind of a shock to the supply chain to incentivize American companies to bring components out of China. And I think that like, everybody talks about this, so I'll try not to harp on it too much. But it is really, really surprising, the level to which everything is made in China. And I'll just take one example, which is like a camera. You know, you can get a sensor that's made in Japan or Korea pretty easily, like the actual array of silicon that takes in the light. To get the lens made outside of China is more difficult. And then to get, if you as like, just a small business,

• 50:36Speaker 03

  not like a larger company, wanted to get the PCB that goes on the back of that sensor and get that made outside of Shenzhen, you basically can't do that without paying like, four, five, six times as much, and your options are just like so, so, so limited. And I think you basically just see that across every level of the stack. And it's not, it's basically all these little load-bearing points where you rip one thing out and you go down like two levels of the supply chain. And then you realize, oh, actually, this one very niche thing is only made in China.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Are American drone companies, both startup and from maybe even the primes, are they doing the work to reconstitute those supply lines here in the States? Or? For the foreseeable future, Ian, are we not going to be able to do enough in nation manufacturing to kind of like supply our own drone components?

• 51:37Speaker 03

  I'm scared now. I've been really impressed by what like the the top American drone companies have have been doing and how creative they get. And and also, like, I think, yeah, time is a factor and and having demand is a factor. But you also realize, like, none of this, none of this stuff is that hard individually. Like, in aggregate, it becomes basically impossible. But like, that PCB example, it's like, okay, well, if you have this, if you have this demand, like, you can put together PCBs in lots of places. You just have to get enough people together that they go, go to somebody in a in a different country and they say, hey, we need this.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  The key thing that we need to figure out in in our country is like, how do you have a real commercial industry around these microelectronics? Because you you look at like, the American industry in, you know, the 40s, 50s, it's like this heavy industry, you know, you mentioned automobile industry. Um, that lends itself to these like very large systems. And we have a a culture that lends itself to that. We have a culture also that lends itself to like information technology, right? Like, we we were, we were the country that first invented the filing cabinet, just because we love information so much and like storing it. So then, of course, when a computer comes out, like, we just have this domestic demand for computers.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  But then you you look at China and they've just been making all the world's stuff for so long that they have all of these smaller component manufacturers that serve a very large domestic market. And so now that we're seeing like war or defense change to bias towards small electronic components, and and we're having to ask ourselves like, oh, this is, this has significantly more of an impact on on the battlefield than we had thought five to 10 years ago, just cheap, small electronic components. Like, what can we do in the US such that we are? You know, we have domestic demand at scale for cheap, small electronic components.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Do you know that that that project cost plus drugs? It's essentially like, I think it's maybe it's Mark Cuban who's working on this. They seem to just make generic drugs in the US for a very low price. I feel like we need some billionaire to be like, I'm gonna make the PCB base company and I'm gonna make PCBs at cost. And we're gonna make no money, but if you need springs, PCBs, you know, carbon screws, whatever the fuck, we will make it. And then just like, just do it with the existing capital base, because this is not impossible.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  It's definitely not, and I I think defense is like a great reason to focus on. I just, I do think, I I don't know, I mean, I get very scared because I I just don't think like, I I I don't think that there's that much of an incentive in our current commercial industry, like without a ton of protectionism for us to move like back towards manufacturing. Like there's, there's so many regulations against making stuff. So few people like, we we have like such a high labor cost that it's like, you know, and people talk about automation. I think that's like one way out, but it's like, you know, who who is going to be the person that is putting together these these tiny little components all day for $2 an hour?

• 54:59Speaker 03

  And and how do we even compete against that? And so like, I I don't really have the answers to that, but it's it's definitely like a a huge problem. Because I think we we're just kind of waking up to the fact that like, a a lot of things that we have not invested in turn out to be like very, very important in a, you know, global geopolitical arms race of sorts.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is why I think even us, you know, staunch no industrial policy folks are starting to go, well, what if we had a little bit of industrial policy? Just, just a dusting on top, you know, because. Capitalism is amazing and such a great engine, but it does not always foresee national security needs.

• 55:50Speaker 03

  Well, we're also highly regulated, right? Like, we have so, we have a minimum wage, we have environmental protections. Like, I'm not saying get rid of the minimum wage and, like, child labor and dump things into rivers, but like, you know, you don't necessarily need more laws. Like, a lot of it could be solved also by having less laws, but I don't think that there's a lot of demands from our population for that.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Zero, yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  Also, I would say, like, I think we think about this, it's in vogue in, like, Silicon Valley and, like, among people that that make things to be talking about these issues, but like, maybe this is a little pessimistic, but I just don't think that the average American, like, particularly cares that much about about a lot of these issues.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  The average person only cares about what they've recently seen on television and what their friend told them. Like, we're not talking about...

• 56:47Speaker 00

  I mean, like, I don't know. I don't know if that brings me down. I mean, if if we only do things that the average person cares about, we're not going to do much, but we will watch a lot of American Idol.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  I guess I'm just saying, I don't know if you're going to see, like, broad popular support for, like, you know, deregulating critical industries, because I think if anything, we're seeing, like, an increase in demand for regulation of of critical industries, like nuclear, again. I don't know, you know, I think maybe people just spend a lot of time on Twitter, like, everybody wants to deregulate nuclear, which I think is, like, good, build more nuclear reactors, like, that's kind of a new thing. But then, so that's thumbs up, but, you know, you also see, like, we want to regulate ourselves out of AI. And I think it's also, like, yeah, I think America just has a lot of, we have

• 57:38Speaker 03

  a hard hand that we've been dealt, and I think we'll figure it out, but... You know, the thing that keeps me up at night is like, we allow ourselves to be exposed to all this information from every country in the world, comes on to our internet and speaks to us in English and convinces our citizens of different things. And like, you know, I spent some time looking at like, what would it be like to like, do propaganda on like, behind the Chinese firewall, like if I wanted to run, it's impossible, like you just can't do it. But it's like well documented and very easy to influence the minds of Americans. And so I think that really works to our detriment.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  I could talk to you about that issue and that set of issues for about seven years. But for the sake of this interview, I'm going to loop us back to Theseus. This is not sadly, the Ian and Alex talk about the future of industrial policy hour. So before I let you go, I'm really curious about your time at Y C. You guys were, I believe, the company said in a release, I think the first defense tech company to go through the famed accelerator. So just really quickly, how was that? And do you think that it would help the issues we're describing if there were like another like 50 Theseus's equivalent going through American accelerators to like jumpstart these processes?

• 58:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it was great. I really have never experienced like a higher density of really talented, intelligent, like kind, motivated people than in Y C. And I think we had like, you know, Aaron is a really great group partner, Aaron Epstein. And just like, it was a really great experience. I think they've started to invest like way, way, way more into defense. I have heard a thing that like with accelerators, they typically just follow what the founders are interested in. So I think there's just been an uptick.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  You know, for example, our company started out of a hackathon, like I didn't wake up one day and be like, oh, I wanna, I wanna start this company. It's just there's, there's so many problems, like even to the conversation we were just having, like, I think. You can look at the world and you can see these problems and feel like, oh, there's nothing I can do, or you can just pick an issue and start working as hard as you can towards it. And so luckily, I think you see a lot of companies, you know, coming out of the US and Silicon Valley now that that are focused on on kind of these key aspects of working in the national interest. I think it's already started happening. Do I think

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  that there could be more of it? Yeah, but then also to the thing I was just saying, like, maybe also like commercially focused, not just defense focused, because we're not like, we're not Ukraine, and we have a different problem set than than they do, and we're not actively being invaded.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Well, we are currently in a different region dealing with drones. So, you know, I don't think, look, no matter what you can say about America, we do get busy, you know? We have a history of being a busy nation. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of places we get to play this technology. Ian, listen, thank you so much. What's the website? And I do hope that tonight you get some more sleep and that Russia does not bomb Kiev as much so that way you can actually sleep.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it. It's a thesis.us, T A G S E U S dot U S.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Awesome. And I don't get to say this too often, because I try to stay pretty much impartial with founders, but I hope you kick maximum ass and I hope the technology goes even better than you expect, because I would like Ukraine to win and soon. Thank you for coming on, Ian.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Thanks. I appreciate it. Take care.